The Canadian Commonwealth eBook

It is almost a truism that the farther north the land,
the greater the fertility, if there be any fertility
at all. There is first the supply of unfailing
moisture, with a yearly subsoiling of humus unknown
to arid lands. Canada is super-sensitive about
her winter climate—­the depth and intensity
of the frost, the length and rigor of her winters;
but she need not be. It should be cause of gratitude.
Frost penetrating the ground from five to twelve
feet—­as it does in the Northwest—­guarantees
a subterranean root irrigation that never fails.
Heavy snow—­let us acknowledge frankly snow
sometimes banks western streets the height of a man—­means
a heavy supply of moisture both in thaw and rain.
There is second the long sunlight. An earth
tilted on its axis toward the sun six months of the
year gives the North a sunlight that is longer the
farther north you go. When the sun sets at seven
to eight in New York, it sets at eight to nine in Winnipeg,
and nine to ten in Athabasca, and only for a few hours
at all still farther north. It is the long sunlight
that gives the fruit of Niagara and Quebec and Annapolis
its “fameuse” quality; just as it is the
sunlight that gives western fruit its finest coloring,
the higher up the plateau it is grown. It is
the long sunlight that gives Number One Hard Wheat
its white fine quality so indispensable to the millers.
So of barley and vegetables and small fruits and
all that can be grown in the short season of the North.
What the season lacks in length it gains in intensity
of sunlight. Four months of twenty-hour sunlight
produce better growth in some products than eight
months of shorter sunlight.

These two advantages of moisture and sunlight, Canada
possesses.[5] What else has she? It doesn’t
mean much to say that Canada equals Europe in area
and that you could spread Germany and France and Austria
and Great Britain over the Dominion’s map and
still have an area uncovered equal to European Russia.
Nor does it mean much more to say that in Canada
you can find the climate of a Switzerland in the Canadian
Rockies, of Italy in British Columbia, of England in
the maritime provinces and of Russia in the Northwest.
Areas are so great and diverse that you have to examine
them in groups to realize what basis of fact Canada
builds from.

Girt almost round by the sea are the maritime provinces—­Nova
Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick—­in
area within sixty-seven square miles of the same size
as England, and in climate not unlike the home land.[6]
Your impression of their inhabitants is of a quiescent,
romantic, pastoral and sea-faring people—­sprung
from the same stock as the liberty-seekers of New
England, untouched by the mad unrest of modern days,
conservative as bed-rock, but with an eye to the frugal
main chance and a way of making good quietly.
They do not talk about the simple life in the maritime
provinces because they have always lived it, and the
land is famed for its diet of codfish, and its men